Revenant (21 page)

Or maybe a cry for help.

‘What is it? What’s going on?” Raven asked, turning her head to look quizzically at Sharon.

“Shut up,” she hissed. “Did you hear that?”

Raven shrugged. “What?”

“Never mind,” Sharon answered, concentrating, trying to focus all of her attention on her sense of hearing. Finally she shook her head. It must have been her imagination.

She took one step and heard it again, weaker this time, if that was possible. It was just barely intelligible. But it wasn’t a puppy whimpering and it wasn’t anyone snoring under a blanket. It was a cry for help, and it had come from the basement, Sharon was suddenly sure of it.

She looked at Raven and realized Raven had heard it this time, too. The young woman was watching her with sharp, clear, calculating eyes and Sharon knew if this girl had suffered an injury down in that basement, it definitely wasn’t anything too serious. She also knew the minute she let Raven out of her sight, the girl would run like a greyhound.

“Come with me,” she said, pulling Raven toward the kitchen sink. The girl stumbled and almost fell.

“What are you doing? What’s going on?” she said.

“Get on your knees.”

“What?”

“JUST DO IT.” Sharon was out of patience. She couldn’t tell whether the voice from the basement was Mike’s or not, but someone was definitely still down there, and that someone needed help, and Raven’s “poor me” game was getting old very quickly.

She forced the reluctant woman to a kneeling position and grabbed her handcuffs off her belt, leaning down and hooking one of the bracelets around the drain pipe under one of the kitchen sink’s dual tubs. Then she pulled Raven’s thin wrist toward her and slapped the other side around it. She had no idea how sturdy the pipe was, but this girl was even tinier than her—maybe 95 pounds soaking wet—and she was willing to bet Raven wouldn’t be able to escape before her return even if the pipe had weakened with age.

“Don’t you move,” she said, standing quickly and trotting to the basement door. She yanked it open and the smell of rot and corruption struck her again and her eyes began to water as she descended the stairs. She was sure the cry she heard had originated in the basement, but the damned basement was wide open and practically empty. Where had someone been imprisoned that wasn’t immediately apparent when she was down there?

She took the stairs two at a time, hanging on to the wooden stair rail and hoping she wouldn’t stumble and twist an ankle. The minute her eyes cleared the wall she knew exactly where the call for help had come from. The floor freezer at the far end of the basement was almost exactly the perfect dimensions for stashing a body.

She realized she had been distracted by the murdered man lying in the middle of the cement floor, as well as by the injured Raven, but still Sharon mentally kicked herself for not investigating the freezer; for not at least opening the lid and checking it out.

Another cry came from inside the freezer, this one weak and barely loud enough to hear. She took the final four stairs in one flying leap—to hell with worrying about a twisted ankle—and landed with a smack on the floor, stumbling but keeping her feet, making a wide berth around the dead body and all the blood and then sprinting to the freezer.

She yanked on the silver latch and her nervous, sweaty fingers slipped off it. Another swipe at it and the latch gave way and she pushed up on the hinged lid and there was Mike McMahon, crumpled on the freezer floor. His face was bright crimson and sweat poured off every exposed bit of skin in rivers and he seemed unable to catch his breath.

“Sweet Jesus,” Sharon muttered and clambered over the side of the freezer, hooking a hand arm under each of his armpits, struggling to lift his much heavier body. He smiled weakly and breathed deeply, his chest heaving, taking in the foul stench like it was crystal clear mountain air. He slipped out of her grasp and fell to the floor again, then pushed himself up to a kneeling position, hanging his head over the side of the freezer.

“What took you so long?” he whispered, and Sharon knelt down in the freezer, straddling his legs. She kissed him hard, knowing it was unprofessional but not caring.

She felt tears welling up in her eyes and forced them back. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily,” she answered. “This is a hell of a time to take a nap, though. In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a lot going on right now.”

“Thanks for the pep talk,” he said, and grabbed the side of the freezer with both hands, forcing himself to his feet. He stepped over the side and stumbled to his knees on the cement and Sharon grabbed him, watching his eyes closely. “Are you going to be okay?”

Mike nodded. “I think so. A few more minutes inside that thing, though, and I think I would have been taking the long nap. Lights were blossoming in my eyes and I couldn’t catch my breath to save my life. Literally. But I’m feeling better and better, just pissed off that Manning was able to get the drop on me.”

“Manning?” Sharon said. “Earl Manning? Earl threw you into this freezer?”

“Yeah. What about it?”

“I have a witness that says she either saw Earl Manning get killed or she saw him kill someone. She wouldn’t be any more specific and now she’s clammed up.”

Mike looked down at her, his eyes seeming to become clearer and more alert by the second. “Well, if Manning’s dead, then he’s a zombie, because he was moving around pretty damned good a little while ago. In fact, he hit me like a freaking freight train. He seemed to have had a lot more strength than a scrawny little drunk should.”

Sharon shuddered. “Zombie? That’s not funny.”

“I wasn’t trying to be.”

32

The strange little group stumbled out of the house, Mike in the lead, clearly already more alert now than he had been just a few minutes ago, apparently none the worse for wear after nearly suffocating in the freezer. Raven followed him closely, with Sharon bringing up the rear, maintaining a tight grip on her prisoner’s upper arm.

Sharon wasn’t sure whether the young woman qualified more as a suspect or a witness, but one thing she
was
sure of was that Raven knew a lot more about what had gone down in that basement than she had thus far revealed. It seemed unlikely a woman as tiny as Raven could have gotten enough of a jump on the much bigger male victim to do the kind of damage that had been inflicted upon him, but Sharon had seen some strange things since returning to Paskagankee and had learned not to discount any possibility. Ever. Even if it was an
im
possibility.

They crossed the scraggly front lawn and Sharon said, “Wanna ride in my cruiser and then come back for yours after you get checked out at the hospital?”

Mike shook his head, wincing slightly as he did so. “No.”

Sharon narrowed her eyes. “You took a pretty good knock on the head, are you sure you should be driving?”

“That’s not what I mean,” Mike answered. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll stay here and secure the area. I can get a head start on the investigation and be as prepared as possible when the evidence techs get here.”

“You mean you’re not even going to the hospital?”

“No reason to,” he said. “I’m okay now and it’s not like we’re exactly overloaded with manpower. Harley can stay on routine patrol while you drive our friend here to the hospital to get checked out. I’m going to call Pete Kendall at home and get him out here to handle things on-scene, and I’ll come join you at the hospital after I’ve passed this off to him. That will give Ms . . .”

“Tahoma,” the young woman answered.

“That will give Ms Tahoma the opportunity to secure legal counsel if she wants it and we can begin interrogating her when I get to Orono.”

“You’re the boss,” Sharon said reluctantly. She knew he should see a doctor before continuing, but he did have a point about the lack of manpower. Officers were hard to come by in a town as small and remote as Paskagankee, Maine, especially qualified ones. Investigating a murder, while simultaneously conducting a search for the missing Brett Parker, was going to tax the tiny force to the limit.

Sharon knew Mike would have to call in outside help. He would be reluctant to do so, given how he had been shut out of the search for the killer roaming Paskagankee last fall by the Maine State Police investigative team, but she had known him long enough to know he would never allow personal feelings to get in the way of his job, especially when it involved something as important as a murder investigation.

She gazed into his eyes, holding his stare, wondering whether the intense fear she had felt when he went missing was showing on her face as plainly as she thought it must be. Breaking up with Mike had been the only sensible solution to an unsolvable problem, she knew that. She was surprised the Town Council hadn’t taken action against Mike already for living with his subordinate.

But, goddammit, the pain was almost too much to bear. She had never felt whole until meeting Mike McMahon, and the thought of having to forego all the good he brought out in her for the rest of her life was unbearable. His going missing had only crystallized and clarified the feelings she had already known were there.

She tore her eyes away from his, aware that they had begun to tear up again, and hoped he didn’t notice. She cleared her throat. “Okay, then.” She pushed Raven Tahoma roughly into the back of her cruiser and slid into the front seat, firing up the engine.

“Hey,” Mike said gently.

She looked up at him.

“Be careful driving.”

She nodded, wiping the sleeve of her uniform blouse over her eyes, then gunned the engine, hitting the gas harder than she intended. She refused to return Mike’s stare as she backed quickly down the driveway, giving the empty road her full attention. She slammed the car into Drive and accelerated away. Then she rounded a corner and the ramshackle house was gone.

33

Brett Parker heard the sound of airplanes buzzing overhead, nonstop, one after the other, like he was right next to the runway at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. How the hell had he gotten here? He tried to remember. He had been working at the new summer retreat in Maine when—

—He opened his eyes, doing his best to ignore a pounding in his skull unlike any headache he had ever experienced, and realized it wasn’t airplanes buzzing around his head at all; it was mosquitoes. The insects were everywhere, swarming around him, feasting on his flesh; great black clouds of mosquitoes, more of the vicious blood-suckers than Brett had ever seen in one place; more than he would ever have imagined
could
be present in one place.

He lay on his side, crumpled in a pile inside the wreckage of the Porsche, his body stuffed uncomfortably into the foot well on the passenger’s side—again—like some giant had used him to try to plug a hole in the floor of the car. His head hurt and his arm throbbed painfully and his back felt like a soccer team had used it for kicking practice. But he was alive, and, it seemed, unharmed, relatively speaking.

Brett raised his head painfully and glanced up into the driver’s side of the vehicle, looking for the freak who had kidnapped him right out of his own home and put this whole nightmare in motion. He was nowhere to be seen, and the car door on that side of the vehicle had been torn completely off its hinges. Safety glass from the windshield—and, apparently, all of the broken passenger windows—covered every available inch of surface, glittering colorfully in the muted light. A pine tree branch, at least two inches thick, had smashed through the rear window and then snapped off, the blunt end looking exactly like a battering ram, suspended inches from Brett’s head.

But the creepy lunatic who had been driving the Porsche was gone. He had disappeared, maybe ripped from the car’s interior by the force of the crash, maybe propelled through the windshield by the pine tree branch. Brett didn’t know and didn’t care. He was gone. In all likelihood he was dead. The guy hadn’t been the picture of health to begin with—the smell of death hung on him like a shroud—and the odds of him surviving such a violent car wreck were absurdly low. Brett wondered how
he
had managed it.

He braced his right arm on the floor and pain flashed up it from wrist to elbow. He sucked in a breath, trying not to cry out, not wanting to alert his captor he had awakened. He knew he was being foolish, Freaky Dude had to be dead, or at least badly injured and incapacitated, but the world had suddenly gone mad, tilting crazily on its axis, and he wasn’t taking any chances.

He eased his right arm out from under his body. Something was obviously broken in that one. He tried the left arm, pushing gingerly until assuring himself it was okay. It held his weight. He pushed harder, wishing he could shoo away all of the mosquitoes. They seemed to be everywhere and had redoubled their attack when he began to move.

His arm throbbed and his back throbbed and his head hurt, he felt like he might be sick to his stomach at any moment, but gradually Brett rose up from the floor of the Porsche like a magic trick, pushing and straining, managing to slide his legs underneath his body until he was in a kneeling position, his stomach braced against the supple leather of the passenger seat, his face pressed against the backrest.

He reached for the door handle with his left hand and pulled. Nothing happened. He pulled again, and again nothing happened, and the old cliché about insanity being defined as attempting the same thing over and over and expecting a different result popped into his head and he almost chuckled.

The door was obviously jammed. He could pull on it all day and it was never going to open. He would have to go out the driver’s side. No worry about
that
door being jammed; it was missing in action. Of course, there was the small matter of crawling under the broken pine tree branch, and trying not to cut himself to ribbons on all of the broken glass, but he was alive, and the freak who had caused all his problems was gone, and
he could do this.

Brett pushed with his feet and slithered sideways, bracing himself with his good arm as the gearshift stabbed him in the belly. The branch pushed relentlessly down on his body and for a moment he thought there might not be enough room to squeeze through. Then the small of his back dipped under the branch and the pressure was gone and his upper body slid off the driver’s seat and he fell into
that
foot well.